Interview: Annie Somerville of Greens

Chef Annie Somerville at Greens restaurant in San Francisco, Calif., on February 27, 2009.

What better way to celebrate the first day of spring than by chatting with Annie Somerville of Greens?

Literally sitting on the dock of the bay, Greens Restaurant is a San Francisco institution, and for the last several decades, Somerville has been presiding over the ground-breaking vegetarian restaurant.

In the ’70s, Somerville found Greens via the San Francisco Zen Center, which owns the restaurant. Prior the restaurant’s 1979 opening, she found herself gravitating toward the kitchen while living at Tassajara, the Zen Center’s retreat a few hours south of Monterey, due east from Big Sur.

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Anderson peaches and kabobs on the grill at Greens. Photo: The Chronicle 2011.

As she’ll explain in the interview, it was a different time and place. Now, there’s a farmers’ market right outside her door at Fort Mason, and over 30 years later, she’s still crafting creative fare, along with her chef, John Paul Ueber. Below is the first half our little Q&A interview; stay tuned for Part Two tomorrow.

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PL: How did you end up at Greens?

AS: I lived at Tassajara for three years and cooked there. Meanwhile, Zen Center was a very young organization, just getting its footprint and one of the imperative things was to find a way for Zen Center to be financially self-supportive, without always depending on donations.

We had a very entrepreneurial leader at the time, and his idea was to open a business — and we were really good at food. We cooked and baked bread and you know, made good stuff for people. So Zen Center opened the Tassajara Bread Bakery on Cole and Parnassus, which is now the location of La Boulange. That was super successful, with people were waiting in line like they do today with all these new places.

You were Tartine and Blue Bottle before they were.

We were! You couldn’t get good bread at the time, and we predated Acme. Then the idea came to open a restaurant because we were so successful at cooking for guests at Tassajara. Long story short, here we are in Greens today. Deborah Madison was our founding chef, and we all knew each other as part of a community. I had the opportunity to work with Deborah for two or three years before she moved on to do other things.

What was like working at Greens during that time (the late 70s and early 80s)?

It was a very different time. A really exciting time. Greens was super busy, and what were doing was very cutting edge. We were just creating something very new, just making it up. Sometimes you don’t realize you’re making it up at the time — but we were.

So when you say things were different…?

Mainly, the availability of all these ingredients that we have now and the access to organic produce and small farmers — just the connections here and now with all the small producers, winemakers and cheesemakers. It’s different now.

Back then, in the summer months and warm months, we were able get as much as we could from Green Gulch. They were new to organic farming, and some of the produce was a little funky [laughs], a few little bug bites here and there. And we were working with other small farms, especially up in the delta and more in the Davis area, since Deborah had grown up in Davis and knew people up there. But the rest of the year, we were using commercially grown produce because that’s all there was. Now, there’s this proliferation and this wealth of ingredients.

How about on the dining side?

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From the Chronicle Archives: The Greens dinner menu around its 15th birthday in summer 1994. Click to enlarge.

Well, I think people now are so sophisticated about food. People travel the world, they travel in the United States. Look at the city. Look what you can eat here, just walking down any street.

There were a lot of good restaurants at that time. We’re of the generation of Zuni and Hayes Street Grill. We all share that same anniversary, opening that same year [1979]. And of course, Chez Panisse predated us. There was very much an affinity and closeness among those restaurants, because we were all striving to do this new thing. Bay Wolf too, and and of course others as well whose names I cannot recall.

What were you striving for?

How about this: It was just so fun to be cooking with vegetables, to be making these dishes where vegetables were the main deal, as opposed to being off on the side. To make vegetables and prepare dishes that were beautiful and delicious — and that could be made without the standard proteins — was exciting and different.

Now that we see vegetables having such a starring role in so many restaurants of all sorts, do you feel a sense of validation?

It is validation. Also, since I shop at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market twice a week — I’m what you call a regular there — I’ve gotten to know so many chefs. And the chefs just keep coming through in waves. Some of them I don’t know; but at some point if we keep running into each other, we introduce ourselves.

The chefs that are shopping there love vegetables. I was talking to Staffan Terje on Saturday and he was just saying how you can be so creative with vegetables and less so with your meat and fish. The folks I know are very committed to great seasonal fruits and vegetables.

It’s a really fun thing to be part of. It’s real life, not just an idea. These are real connections and these are people who earn their living doing this, growing these crops, making cheese. Watching the change and the proliferation of farmers’ market throughout the whole region. Neighborhood markets sparking up and all the ways people are connected — it’s really different now than it was.

Speaking of younger chefs, what’s been your experience with the latest generation of cooks?

The folks I’ve gotten to know are people from the market, and they’re so down to earth. They’re just as excited about cooking carrots, kale and bitter greens as I am — if not more so. For them, it’s like there are no rules. People are just making things up right now, in a really great way.

It’s really such a creative environment. It’s an electric environment in terms of what people are doing now, by trying all kinds of things. Everybody has a different take on how to cook, serve and present their food.